al-Saleh - Voices of the Arab Spring: personal stories of the Arab revolutions
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Voices of the Arab Spring: personal stories of the Arab revolutions: summary, description and annotation
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Narrated by dozens of activists and everyday individuals involved in the Arab Spring, this book documents the unprecedented events that led to the collapse of dictatorial regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Arab citizens were called to join the revolt during the second half of 2011, while the revolutionary moment was still unfolding. Their stories offer unique access to the message that inspired citizens to act, their experiences during revolt, and the lessons they learned from some of the most dramatic changes and appalling events to occur in the history of the Arab world. The riveting, revealing, and at times heartbreaking stories in this volume also include voices from Syria. Featuring participants from a variety of social and educational backgrounds and political commitments, these personal stories of action represent the true phenomenon of the Arab Springs united though broad social movements, collective identities, and youthful character. For years, these participants lived under regimes that brutally suppressed free expression and protest. Their testimony speaks to the multifaceted emotional, psychological, and cultural factors motivating citizens to join together and fight, putting a human face on events that might seem abstract or impersonal to many in the West--Provided by publisher.;Foreword: Understanding recent social and political developments in the Middle East and North Africa : a personal odyssey / Peter Sluglett -- Tunisia -- Egypt -- Libya -- Yemen -- Syria.
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Voices of the Arab Spring
Voices of the Arab Spring
PERSONAL STORIES FROM THE ARAB REVOLUTIONS
Asaad Al-Saleh
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2015 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53858-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
al-Saleh, Asaad.
Voices of the Arab Spring : personal stories of the Arab revolutions / Asaad al-Saleh.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-231-16318-7 (cloth : acid-free paper)ISBN 978-0-231-16319-4 (paperback : acid-free paper)ISBN 978-0-231-53858-9 (e-book)
1. Arab Spring, 2010Personal narratives. 2. Political activistsArab countriesBiography. 3. Arab countriesBiography. 4. Protest movementsArab countriesHistory21st century. 5. RevolutionsArab countriesHistory21st century. 6. Political participationArab countriesHistory21st century. 7. Social changeArab countriesHistory21st century. 8. Arab countriesPolitics and government21st century. 9. Arab countriesSocial conditions21st century. I. Title.
DS63.12.A57 2015
909.097492708312dc23
2014019952
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .
COVER IMAGE: ALEX MAJOLI/MAGNUM PHOTOS
Cover Design: Martin Hinze
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
For all the fallen heroes of the Arab Spring who no longer can tell their own stories.
CONTENTS
For most of my adult lifetime, the news from the Middle East has been almost uniformly gloomy. Until quite recently, it seemed that the Arab world was unable to leave behind its postcolonial trauma. There were some exceptions: for a while in the 1950s and early 1960s, Arabs now in their sixties and seventies had a window of hope. Nasser and his Free Officer colleagues took Egypt out of British control and set it on a path that seemed to be moving toward the recovery of national dignity and independence, overthrowing the monarchy in July 1952 and nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956. That same year, unable to bear the expense of maintaining control over all three of its North African possessions, France gave independence to two of them, Tunisia and Morocco. In July 1958 in Iraq, a military coup that became a revolution overthrew the monarchy and established a republic. In July 1962 a long and bloody colonial war in Algeria ended with the defeat of France and the independence of Algeria. These were indeed heady days, and I think that except for the hopes raised and so soon dashed for the Iranian revolution in 1979, nothing of such moment, and certainly nothing promoting such optimism, happened in the Middle East between the early 1960s and 2011.
Historians tend not to try to guess what may or may not happen in the future. As I sometimes say to tease my colleagues, we leave that sort of speculation to political scientists. That said, however, I am not very optimistic about what may happen in Syria, still less about the international communitys being able to do anything especially positive there. Because of the way the United Nations is set up and a fairly widely held belief that states should not intervene in the internal affairs of other states, it is almost bound to fail the people of Syria in much the same way it failed the people of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. Furthermore, there are few indications that Libya is emerging from the chaos that it inherited from Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi. In Egypt, I imagine that the definition of an optimist is someone who thinks that Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will be or is an improvement on ex-president Hosni Mubarak.
Growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s, I believed that the world was a dangerous place, the main issue being the ever present, if always somewhat distant and unreal, possibility of nuclear annihilation as the result of a planned or accidental confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. As I grew older, though, it became increasingly clear that this was not going to happen. Nonetheless, one of the principal manifestations of the Cold War was a series of proxy and regionally bounded wars fought by clients of the superpowers. These usually took the form of quarrels in far away countries between people of whom we know nothing, to echo the assertion by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain on Hitlers takeover of the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, in 1938. Some of these far away countries were in the Middle East, although as Fred Halliday reminds us, the proxy wars in that part of the world generally had many fewer casualties than did those in many other Cold War conflicts: For all its participation in a global process, and the inflaming of inter-state conflict, the Cold War itself had a limited impact on the Middle East; in many ways, and despite its proximity to the USSR, the Middle East was less affected than other parts of the Third World.
Despite these relatively modest casualty figures, the Cold War had deep, lasting, and traumatic effects on the Middle East. Apart from prolonging the regions de facto colonial status, the United States and the Soviet Unions constant struggle for influence polarized and/or anesthetized political life in most Middle Eastern countries, facilitating the rise of military or military-backed regimes and generally stunting or distorting the growth of indigenous political institutions. The superpowers various clients also contributed generously to the regions destabilization by attempting, with some success, to involve their patrons in the local conflicts in which they were engaged.
It is often alleged that democracy has no natural roots in the Middle East, or in the Muslim world in general, and hence the growth of democratic institutions is impossible and should not be expected. But the Ottoman Empire had a constitution in 1876; Tunisia, in 1881; Egyptsort ofin 1882; and Iran, in 1906. Also, as is clear from events in the Arab world since 2011, it is absurd to pretend that Muslims or Arabs or any other people are inherently antithetical to democracy or incapable of embracing democratic institutions. On the contrary, Asaad al-Saleh believes that allowing individuals to express themselves in written narratives, collected here in Voices of the Arab Spring, will cause many readers to reassess the potential for social, political, and cultural change in the Arab world.
Only two countries, Turkey and Israel, have functioned continuously since the 1940s as more or less recognizable parliamentary democracies in which the rule of law has generally prevailed and the opposition has won parliamentary elections and then become the government. Even here, though, the record is not spotless, given the number of military interventions in Turkish politics and the fact that about one-third of Israelis have no say whatsoever in the most basic aspects of their governance. In addition, during the period between the two world wars and immediately after 1945, there were, albeit within limits, lively and contested parliamentary elections in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and, in some sense, Egypt. There also was a spirited anticolonial and anti-imperialist movement led by local communists and leftists.
What these leftists were actually advocating, or what they did achieve in the limited arenas in which they were able to take charge, was quite modest and restrained: the creation of trade unions, the fundamentals of compensated land reform, the nationalization of leading industries, a free health and welfare program, and so on. In fact, with the exception of land reform, almost exactly the same goals were prominent on the platforms of almost all Western European social democratic parties.
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